Bashscripts.org

HI All,
My backup script works well except for logging the info. I have run "script" to debug the operation but when I do this everything runs perfectly. The problem must be some dumb thing I am not seeing. I hope some other eyes will help. BTW the script runs as a cron job. It does the backups (checked), it creates the date variable (checked) it creates and properly dates the info file (checked) but then doesn't put any info into the file. If the same script is run from the command line, everything including file info is done as expected. I'm at a loss, so any help will be greatly appreciated.


Thanks,
Jimm

Hmm... I'm not sure. Try redirecting stderr to the file as well so you can see any errors that occur:

Thanks for the thought thobbs, but no joy. I set stderr to go to the backuplog file but the script still wrote nothing. Since it does write when I run it from the cli I was thinking that maybe it is a permission issue but I create the input file as 777 and still nothing writes. I also turned off selinux just in case it wasn't announcing a permission error but still nothing. This is getting frustrating. I appreciate your help. Thanks.
Jimm

what's the date format of ls -la output?

The date format is the same as the Y-m-d in the variable. That is why the script does create the log file properly when run from the cli. What is frustrating me is that the same script, run from cron, won't write to the file. Thanks.

what's your OS?

GNU/Linux doesn't seem to have such an output for ls -la

OS is fedora 11 and a sample ls -la output is:
-rw-rw-r--. 1 jimm jimm 18 2010-02-04 00:00 testdate.txt
From the cli grep recognizes 2010-02-04 and filters based on that.
Thanks

don't you have an alias for ls, which would use --full-time option?

in console enter alias -p

--full-time wouldn't add anything to this script as the date part of the output is the same format and the rest of full-time is superfluous for my filter. Good ideas though, thanks.

I think I got it: that's locales (by default cron's one is C, not user's).
try this:

Thanks a million Watael you hit the nail on the head and the script is now recording my backups very well. Not only that but your prior post got me thinking along the same lines, so I tried a different approach last night and it worked as well. Now we have 2 ways to control the time issue. I'll post my code below in case it helps anyone else.

Thanks again,
Jimm